With nation-wide ISP's, they won't know that some people don't live in California. Which is why letters or phone calls would be far more persuasive. A letter with a return address in the legislators district is probably worth a few hundred emails. --
Nuetrinos don't have any effect on the human body (for the same reason rock won't protect you)they just don't interact with matter much at all. --
Recommended DSL ISP for Southern California
on
Feature: Getting DSL
·
· Score: 1
For those of you in Southern California, I would suggest Interworld for an ISP. The prices and terms of service are reasonable, and the president of the company is himself a tech who is willing to take the time to make a specialized deal. He also gets on the phone himself and harasses GTE when the service gets cut. If anyone is interested, I can give you his email address. --
I understand that I-64 will be backwards compatible with I-32 code, but will a compiler be able to compile object code that works on existing x86 machines while still exploiting the special advantages of I-64. I'm thinking of something similar to the Macintosh format (fat?) that allows a single codebase to work on PPC and 64K chips. --
Of course it's amateurish. (Thank God) If it wasn't amateurish, they would have started charging for premium services, drastically changed the UI a couple of times, and sold the subscription list. Be careful what you wish for.
In my experience Slashdot has been very upfront about problems and changes. Rob's been busy recently which explains the outages and lack of timely notices. While it would be nice to have a slightly more "professional" slashdot (and yes, I would be willing to pay for it) it is hard to see how the site can change without losing its soul. I'd rather have a great service with a few outages than a commercial warzone with un-interrupted service.
If you buy the box, you get phone support for a while (30 days?). That and the book are the main reason I encourage newbies to buy the box. --
Installers are open source, just not standard
on
Time Review of Linux
·
· Score: 1
Another issue is the lack of open sourced installers... (nearly?) every distro has its own installer, and how many system config tools?
Red Hat and Debian (and probably others) both have open sourced installers and configuration tools, but they just use different ones. Open source does not mean standard, although it certainly makes standards easier. I think we should push for LSB first, a standard config tool second, and a standard installer a distant third. Realisticly, the installer is one of the major differentiation points between installations. As long as everything is open source and standards are adhered to where it matters, we have nothing to fear from diversity.
In the best of all possible worlds, perhaps a standard installation format could be agreed to so a single tool could be used on any distribution, but distributions would have the option of developing their own tools as well. As I have said, I feel that uniformity in filesystem structure, etc as defined in a LSB spec would be more valuable in the near term. --
With all due respect, I found the FreeBSD install a little daunting, from the first screen where you have to tell the OS what hardware you have (no autodetection?) to the partitioning tool (ugly but good functionality). The package selection was ok. On the other hand it is possible to muddle through with no offline documentation while a Red Hat install other than Workstation or Server can be quite difficult since there is no nifty "set partitions and mount points to defaults" option as there is in FreeBSD. I currently use Red Hat since it feels closer to Solaris, which I am most familiar with. I must say that the FreeBSD ports collection kicks ass. I'm planning to try Debian one of these days since dpkg sound like a similiarly cool thing. --
Re:The letter I wrote to the editor of time.com
on
Time Review of Linux
·
· Score: 1
Of course KDE is at www.kde.org. Curse ye demons!!
--
Re:The letter I wrote to the editor of time.com
on
Time Review of Linux
·
· Score: 1
Why don't you try reading the article instead of panning it out of hand. I found it to be balanced and informative to the prospective Linux user. He may not be a genius, but that's the point. It's hard to get a good new user's perspective from a CS major. Like it or not, your ability to get your favorite hardware and software to work on Linux is dependent in large part on new users and a consumer market. Let them come. They may change the chrome but they can never change the heart of Linux. New users can only benefit power-users. --
This is amazingly close to my 98 install experience. I got past the unbootable CD-ROM problem and found a boot image on the net. By the way, I could find NO documentation on installing Windows on the Microsoft website while the Red Hat website has voluminous documentation.
I then booted, ran d:\setup.exe and watched as it hard locked half way through telling me there wasn't enough free space on C:. It took me a while to figure out that the installer doesn't know how to deal with an unpartitioned, unformatted harddrive. ARRGGH!! I went back to dos and used fdisk and format which are certainly worse than disk druid especially since they are not in the installer.
I question whether any newbies really install Windows on a really bare computer or whether they call it an install when they are really re-installing or upgrading. --
And yet literally millions of non-technical people have done it. Curious.
Millions of non-technical people have done windows upgrades, not bare installs. There's a big difference. Any slouch can do an upgrade, even a Linux upgrade.
While the Red Hat install has some rough edges there is no non-technical person on this planet that could install Windows 98 on an computer with an unpartitioned hard-drive with only the CD, a blank floppy disk and another computer running 98. They might have a shot at installing Red Hat (although admittedly they would not be likely to be able to get past the login prompt at reboot).
--
The letter I wrote to the editor of time.com
on
Time Review of Linux
·
· Score: 5
I wrote the following letter to the editor of time.com I appreciated Josh Quittner's Linux article [http://cgi.pathfinder.com/time/personal/19990524/ tech.html]. I have been Unix systems adminstrator for three years and a Linux user for a little under a year. His installation criticisms were valid, but it is worth noting that installing Windows 98 onto a computer with an unformatted hard-drive or one that has non-windows OS on it is a truly daunting proposition which took me a couple of hours to figure out. The formatting and partitioning tools are not a part of the standard installation procedure as they are with any Linux distribution, therefore it is necessary to boot off a diskette and use the command line format and fdisk utilities.
The perception of easy Windows installations is largely due to the fact that the vast majority of PC's come with Windows pre-installed. Most users are unlikely to ever do more than upgrade their Windows which is a relatively painless proposition. Upgrading a Red Hat system is just as easy. In my estimation, installing a Red Hat system is easier than installing Windows in any case except when the computer has Windows pre-installed and has no unpartioned disk space.
Overall the article was very informative and made the virtues of Linux clear, including it's open source code, stability and low cost. Your readers may also benefit from knowing that Gnome, while developed with help from Red Hat, is also open source software and is available from www.gnome.com, and that a very viable alternative to Gnome called KDE is available from www.kde.com and is also open source and included in Red Hat 6.0 as well as Caldera, SuSe and other distribution. Finally, it might be noted that an alternative to downloading a distribution or buying a boxed set is to pay a couple of dollars and get the distribution from www.cheapbytes.com which redistributes all of the major distributions sans book documentation and support. I would still recommend that the average user buy a boxed set.
I hope to see further linux coverage in the future.
I have RH 6.0 working beautifully with a Matrox G200. I did an "Upgrade" install over 5.2, but a real install might work better. I couldn't get the real install to work (and no I'm not a Unix newbie either). 5.2 works well with a G200 but you need to get the X updates (mini gripe... the FTP installer should give the option of grabbing updates if available).
I got the Quake to work briefly but I realized that I wasn't using GLX, but software only Mesa. Since then I haven't been able to get it to work at all, or any GLU stuff for that matter, although the X server does recognize the GLX extension at startup.
As an aside. Redhat 6.0 is a great upgrade for those of you running 5.2. The 2.2.5 kernel and glibc 2.1 make a noticable difference in speed, (and apparently make Netscape more stable, but this could be a mirage). It's nice to see that a company can issue an upgrade that performs better than the original. Thanks to all the hackers in and out of Redhat that made it happen. (And no, before you flame me, I haven't tried Debian yet, but I've got an empty partition just waiting for it.)
I've found that 4.51 (glibc version) is more stable and faster under RH 6.0 (glibc 2.1 kernel 2.2.5) than it was under RH 5.2 (glibc 2.0 kernel 2.0.36). That being said, it still crashes or hangs much too often. It seems to work better when you delete history.dat and the clear cache on a regular basis. --
SA: Assuming that the trend will continue for the next 10 years, what do you see happening with all those extra cycles? What are we going to do with that power?
GM: That becomes an interesting question. Fortunately, the software industry has been able to take advantage of whatever speed and memory we could give them. They taken more than we've given, in fact. I used to run Windows 3.1 on a 60 megahertz 486, and things worked pretty well. Now I have a 196 megahertz Pentium running Windows95, and a lot of things take longer than they used to on the slower machine. There's just that much more in software, I guess.
Even Windows 98 does not have a true GUI install. The widgets look similar but they are clearly not a full blown Windows GUI. Most things are bitmaps with mouseover functionality but little else. It looks pretty(?), but it's window dressing.
Windows 98 is a lousy install in other respects as well. Several reboots are necessary. The installer will not install on an unpartioned or partioned and unformatted drive, and does not even give a reasonable error message.
That being said, Redhat should at least give a clear option to create user accounts in the install process and boot into X or at least a/etc/issue and/etc/motd that explains the process of logging in as root, adding a user account and starting X. A welcome to this computer bit of nonsense like Win98 (and IRIX for that matter) has wouldn't be a bad idea either as long as it could be turned off easily.
Competitionkeeper is the perfect name
on
Linux on Dilbert
·
· Score: 1
The reference is to Peacekeeper missiles and is an example of doublespeak. The point is that MS likes to assert that it must have competition or else it wouldn't have to use hard line tactics.
As a case in point, see the article on CNET in which a MS lawyer uses the following convoluted logic: "Gates's email [which looked for ways to protect he MS-DOS gold-mine against DR-DOS], for instance, directly contradicts Caldera's assertion that Microsoft monopolized the market for computer operating systems." See the slashdot article and the Caldera news release.
As the article points out, the figure is almost certainly inflated since most showings are in the evening. I also suspect that opening day crowds for Star Wars will be disproportionately students, who won't be missing work at all, but missing their valuable education (class hours missed... now that would be an interesting estimate).
Finally, "lost productivity" is a misleading figure. If people miss work, they will either not be paid or they will take sick days or vacation days they would have used some other time. So the loss in productivity is offset by lower pay or increase in productivity at a later time. While there will likely be some loss in profits for certain businesses who lose a critical mass of workers, $264 million is clearly too large a figure.
Phone users aren't given a bad name by crank callers because crank callers have a different label. No one generalizes the actions of crank callers to the actions of the phone using population as a whole.
Slashdot Mirror
With nation-wide ISP's, they won't know that some people don't live in
California.
Which is why letters or phone calls would be far more persuasive. A letter with a return address in the legislators district is probably worth a few hundred emails.
--
Nuetrinos don't have any effect on the human body (for the same reason rock won't protect you)they just don't interact with matter much at all.
--
For those of you in Southern California, I would suggest Interworld for an ISP. The prices and terms of service are reasonable, and the president of the company is himself a tech who is willing to take the time to make a specialized deal. He also gets on the phone himself and harasses GTE when the service gets cut. If anyone is interested, I can give you his email address.
--
the point is that it is linked to the old site and has consequently stopped working.
--
I understand that I-64 will be backwards compatible with I-32 code, but will a compiler be able to compile object code that works on existing x86 machines while still exploiting the special advantages of I-64. I'm thinking of something similar to the Macintosh format (fat?) that allows a single codebase to work on PPC and 64K chips.
--
Of course it's amateurish. (Thank God) If it wasn't amateurish, they would have started charging for premium services, drastically changed the UI a couple of times, and sold the subscription list. Be careful what you wish for.
In my experience Slashdot has been very upfront about problems and changes. Rob's been busy recently which explains the outages and lack of timely notices. While it would be nice to have a slightly more "professional" slashdot (and yes, I would be willing to pay for it) it is hard to see how the site can change without losing its soul. I'd rather have a great service with a few outages than a commercial warzone with un-interrupted service.
--
If you buy the box, you get phone support for a while (30 days?). That and the book are the main reason I encourage newbies to buy the box.
--
Another issue is the lack of open sourced
installers... (nearly?) every distro has its own installer, and how many system config tools?
Red Hat and Debian (and probably others) both have open sourced installers and configuration tools, but they just use different ones. Open source does not mean standard, although it certainly makes standards easier. I think we should push for LSB first, a standard config tool second, and a standard installer a distant third. Realisticly, the installer is one of the major differentiation points between installations. As long as everything is open source and standards are adhered to where it matters, we have nothing to fear from diversity.
In the best of all possible worlds, perhaps a standard installation format could be agreed to so a single tool could be used on any distribution, but distributions would have the option of developing their own tools as well. As I have said, I feel that uniformity in filesystem structure, etc as defined in a LSB spec would be more valuable in the near term.
--
With all due respect, I found the FreeBSD install a little daunting, from the first screen where you have to tell the OS what hardware you have (no autodetection?) to the partitioning tool (ugly but good functionality). The package selection was ok. On the other hand it is possible to muddle through with no offline documentation while a Red Hat install other than Workstation or Server can be quite difficult since there is no nifty "set partitions and mount points to defaults" option as there is in FreeBSD. I currently use Red Hat since it feels closer to Solaris, which I am most familiar with. I must say that the FreeBSD ports collection kicks ass. I'm planning to try Debian one of these days since dpkg sound like a similiarly cool thing.
--
Of course KDE is at www.kde.org. Curse ye demons!!
--
arrgh
--
Why don't you try reading the article instead of panning it out of hand. I found it to be balanced and informative to the prospective Linux user. He may not be a genius, but that's the point. It's hard to get a good new user's perspective from a CS major. Like it or not, your ability to get your favorite hardware and software to work on Linux is dependent in large part on new users and a consumer market. Let them come. They may change the chrome but they can never change the heart of Linux. New users can only benefit power-users.
--
This is amazingly close to my 98 install experience. I got past the unbootable CD-ROM problem and found a boot image on the net. By the way, I could find NO documentation on installing Windows on the Microsoft website while the Red Hat website has voluminous documentation.
I then booted, ran d:\setup.exe and watched as it hard locked half way through telling me there wasn't enough free space on C:. It took me a while to figure out that the installer doesn't know how to deal with an unpartitioned, unformatted harddrive. ARRGGH!! I went back to dos and used fdisk and format which are certainly worse than disk druid especially since they are not in the installer.
I question whether any newbies really install Windows on a really bare computer or whether they call it an install when they are really re-installing or upgrading.
--
And yet literally millions of non-technical people have done it. Curious.
Millions of non-technical people have done windows upgrades, not bare installs. There's a big difference. Any slouch can do an upgrade, even a Linux upgrade.
While the Red Hat install has some rough edges there is no non-technical person on this planet that could install Windows 98 on an computer with an unpartitioned hard-drive with only the CD, a blank floppy disk and another computer running 98. They might have a shot at installing Red Hat (although admittedly they would not be likely to be able to get past the login prompt at reboot).
--
I wrote the following letter to the editor of time.com/ tech.html]. I have been Unix systems adminstrator for three years and a Linux user for a little under a year. His installation criticisms were valid, but it is worth noting that installing Windows 98 onto a computer with an unformatted hard-drive or one that has non-windows OS on it is a truly daunting proposition which took me a couple of hours to figure out. The formatting and partitioning tools are not a part of the standard installation procedure as they are with any Linux distribution, therefore it is necessary to boot off a diskette and use the command line format and fdisk utilities.
I appreciated Josh Quittner's Linux article [http://cgi.pathfinder.com/time/personal/19990524
The perception of easy Windows installations is largely due to the fact that the vast majority of PC's come with Windows pre-installed. Most users are unlikely to ever do more than upgrade their Windows which is a relatively painless proposition. Upgrading a Red Hat system is just as easy. In my estimation, installing a Red Hat system is easier than installing Windows in any case except when the computer has Windows pre-installed and has no unpartioned disk space.
Overall the article was very informative and made the virtues of Linux clear, including it's open source code, stability and low cost. Your readers may also benefit from knowing that Gnome, while developed with help from Red Hat, is also open source software and is available from www.gnome.com, and that a very viable alternative to Gnome called KDE is available from www.kde.com and is also open source and included in Red Hat 6.0 as well as Caldera, SuSe and other distribution. Finally, it might be noted that an alternative to downloading a distribution or buying a boxed set is to pay a couple of dollars and get the distribution from www.cheapbytes.com which redistributes all of the major distributions sans book documentation and support. I would still recommend that the average user buy a boxed set.
I hope to see further linux coverage in the future.
Sincerely,
Michael Cope
--
I have RH 6.0 working beautifully with a Matrox G200. I did an "Upgrade" install over 5.2, but a real install might work better. I couldn't get the real install to work (and no I'm not a Unix newbie either). 5.2 works well with a G200 but you need to get the X updates (mini gripe... the FTP installer should give the option of grabbing updates if available).
I got the Quake to work briefly but I realized that I wasn't using GLX, but software only Mesa. Since then I haven't been able to get it to work at all, or any GLU stuff for that matter, although the X server does recognize the GLX extension at startup.
In case you haven't run across it, a good page for getting Quake3 to run with Matrox is at http://www.linuxstart.com/~kva nce/projects/g200.html. And for those that want more G200 info, see http://reality.sgi.com/ri pperda_engr/glx/matrox_stat.html. As I have noted, it hasn't worked for me yet, but it's progressing pretty well.
As an aside. Redhat 6.0 is a great upgrade for those of you running 5.2. The 2.2.5 kernel and glibc 2.1 make a noticable difference in speed, (and apparently make Netscape more stable, but this could be a mirage). It's nice to see that a company can issue an upgrade that performs better than the original. Thanks to all the hackers in and out of Redhat that made it happen. (And no, before you flame me, I haven't tried Debian yet, but I've got an empty partition just waiting for it.)
--
I've found that 4.51 (glibc version) is more stable and faster under RH 6.0 (glibc 2.1 kernel 2.2.5) than it was under RH 5.2 (glibc 2.0 kernel 2.0.36). That being said, it still crashes or hangs much too often. It seems to work better when you delete history.dat and the clear cache on a regular basis.
--
SA: Assuming that the trend will continue for the next 10 years, what do you see happening with all those extra cycles? What are we
going to do with that power?
GM: That becomes an interesting question. Fortunately, the software industry has been able to take advantage of whatever speed and
memory we could give them. They taken more than we've given, in fact. I used to run Windows 3.1 on a 60 megahertz 486, and things
worked pretty well. Now I have a 196 megahertz Pentium running Windows95, and a lot of things take longer than they used to on the
slower machine. There's just that much more in software, I guess.
Even Windows 98 does not have a true GUI install. The widgets look similar but they are clearly not a full blown Windows GUI. Most things are bitmaps with mouseover functionality but little else. It looks pretty(?), but it's window dressing.
/etc/issue and /etc/motd that explains the process of logging in as root, adding a user account and starting X. A welcome to this computer bit of nonsense like Win98 (and IRIX for that matter) has wouldn't be a bad idea either as long as it could be turned off easily.
Windows 98 is a lousy install in other respects as well. Several reboots are necessary. The installer will not install on an unpartioned or partioned and unformatted drive, and does not even give a reasonable error message.
That being said, Redhat should at least give a clear option to create user accounts in the install process and boot into X or at least a
The reference is to Peacekeeper missiles and is an example of doublespeak. The point is that MS likes to assert that it must have competition or else it wouldn't have to use hard line tactics.
As a case in point, see the article on CNET in which a MS lawyer uses the following convoluted logic: "Gates's email [which looked for ways to protect he MS-DOS gold-mine against DR-DOS], for instance, directly contradicts Caldera's assertion that Microsoft monopolized the market for computer operating systems." See the slashdot article and the Caldera news release.
The "e" went out to see The Matrix.
As the article points out, the figure is almost certainly inflated since most showings are in the evening. I also suspect that opening day crowds for Star Wars will be disproportionately students, who won't be missing work at all, but missing their valuable education (class hours missed... now that would be an interesting estimate).
Finally, "lost productivity" is a misleading figure. If people miss work, they will either not be paid or they will take sick days or vacation days they would have used some other time. So the loss in productivity is offset by lower pay or increase in productivity at a later time. While there will likely be some loss in profits for certain businesses who lose a critical mass of workers, $264 million is clearly too large a figure.
Combine them and you have a fully caffeinated tech/poet, a rarity in this modern world.
You've proven the anthesis of your argument.
Phone users aren't given a bad name by crank callers because crank callers have a different label. No one generalizes the actions of crank callers to the actions of the phone using population as a whole.
But that would be too obvious.